Different businesses have different needs for managing their accounting, conceivably by some subset or combination of Cost Center (a business function), Project (an isolate-able transaction or series of transactions, most often related to a single customer) or Department (overlapping with Cost Center, but in a working definition, more focused on the human aspect than business function).
For all the things I dislike about QuickBooks, their classing system seems to be superior to ERPNext’s Cost Center system, though I think this could be improved, simply by adding it to this grid:
Cost Center is currently buried in the Item Details, which means this is possible to do, but is a poor workflow.
Here’s an example of a QuickBooks P&L by class
In the case above it’s actually more analogous to Project than Cost Center, but you can imagine. Here’s a better example:
The use case that I got the most power out of was using classing to mark transactions between two businesses with the same owner; this allowed me to see what the costs to produce , how much COGS and labor were getting shunted into products that were sold at another location. Both locations had the same problem but in reverse and it was very hard to track departmental profitability and markups independently without it.
So, by combining the concept of class and the tree-structure of Cost Centers, I think you end up with a better solution.
Is making this a more robust feature of interest to the community?